HE DEATH of Mario Bava coincided with what many have described as the death of the Italian cinema. Screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi traces the turn of the tide to 1978, when his friend Peppo Sacchi emerged victorious in a trial that brought an end to the public television monopoly in Italy. At that moment, Gastaldi remembers, “I said that our cinema was coming to an end. We never had a very strong in- dustry; our producers were better gamblers than businessmen. [In the wake of that trial], an incredible number of TV stations started showing films for free. We were flooded with free movies, and of course, no one will spend money on what they can have for free. After a few years, after all of the Italian movies had been shown on television, many of the stations failed and a private monopoly was formed by Berlusconi. Then there began a race between the public and private monopolies to buy up all the American films, soap operas, and sitcoms. This left our produc- tion rate near zero. Our films were no longer being dubbed in the US; instead, we dubbed all of [the US] productions. There used to be a tax on dubbing, so that the money earned in Italy by American distributors also had to be spent here. Our govern- ment was corrupted—I don’t know by whom (your guess is as good as mine)—and this dubbing tax eventually disappeared, along with the rules. We used to make 300 films per year, but this diminished to only 60 or 70 per year, most of them Articolo 28s [government-funded low-budget fare] . . . usually shit. The great old producers died or retired, and the new ones didn’t like to take risks, taking their projects to public or private television and asking for money. If someone gave them 3 million lire, they made a film for 2.5 million. Quality became irrelevant.”